As he fights two kinds of terminal disease, and husbands his dwindling energy for the books and poems left within him, one fervent, life-affirming desire spurs Clive James on to reach 2015: he really wants to see Game of Thrones season four.

The 74 year-old author, poet, raconteur and celebrated television critic can’t figure out the knobs on his cable TV box so he’s got to hang on for the DVD box set, he told a 400-strong crowd at the inaugural Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature in London.

It may be his last public appearance, though James just called it “another farewell appearance”.

Clive James appears at the inaugural Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature in London.

He started by unpacking some books of poems from his bag.

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“Talk among yourselves, it’s not much of an action sequence,” he said. “It will be an action sequence if I drop dead. If I slowly stand up, pitch forward, that is actually ‘it’, it’s not an act. So if some of you stronger people in the front row could be ready to pick me up and carry me aloft while the stage staff spontaneously plays the record of (Wagnerian opera) Seigfried’s death march.”

James is more or less confined to Cambridge and has to stay near his hospital, for blood transfusions and other treatments for his leukemia and emphysema, so he finds it hard even to come into London.

Clive James, a writer and broadcaster, at his home in Cambridge, England, Sept. 25, 2012. Photo: Hazel Thompson

“You might ask me why I’m doing it - as with every other red-blooded Australian male I’m doing it to impress Tony Abbott’s daughters,” James said.

He said after he had revealed in previous interviews that he had realised – with some regret – that he was too ill to fly or board a boat and would never see Australia again, people had written suggesting he could use an oxygen machine on a long-haul flight while others had offered a private jet.

"(But) the truth is I can't. Australia is a long way. If you've got weak lungs it can't be recommended."

He said if he managed another book of his autobiography he would call it The Run to the Judge, recalling the phrase of a race caller from Australia.

James reminisced on watching Anzac marches through the centre of Sydney as a child, and described Australia as a ‘dreamland’, a place he was privileged to grow up in, a land he hoped the world could be like.

"It really does matter to me to be still thought of as someone from the colonies," James said.

Elsewhere in the world “life is hardly ever the way life ought to be,” he said. But Australia, captured by Reg Grundy in the red brick bungalow of Neighbours, was the “desiderata that everybody in the world wanted”.

James read the poem Deep River Talk by the late “exceptional” Maori poet Hone Tuwhare.

“He was great and he’s gone but if you can write like that your work is always there,” James said.

And he read from English poet U A Fanthorpe's Not My Best Side, a princess’s conflicted, wry inner monologue as St George rescues her from the dragon.

It was breaking one of his lifelong rules to read the poem, James said.

“It’s vital to have nothing to do with any artform which has dragons in it,” he explained. “I’ve lived by that rule all my life, successfully until quite recently when I was induced by members of my family to watch the first season of Game of Thrones.”

But it turned out to have a wonderful, primitive appeal, a complex simplicity that took you back to the “raw stuff of life” and “the place of the dwarf in modern society”.

“One of the drawbacks of Game of Thrones is the drawback of life itself: people in the show that you have tremendous affection for can suddenly be removed,” James said.

When he saw dragon eggs “I was breaking my rule even watching the eggs… but in box two the dragon eggs hatched and I was still with it,” he said.

“One of my ambitions at this age and in this condition, when I’m short of breath and perhaps not long for this world… my ambition now is to live until box four of Game of Thrones. It’s good to have a target in life.”

Another poem that breaks the rule is Dante’s Inferno.

James closed the event with a reading from his translation of the Divine Comedy, as the narrator rides a dragon into the depths of hell.

“Everywhere I looked was only air, and all except the beast was lost to view… Slowly he wheels, and gradually descends, but I think only of the wind I face – and that wind from down there where the flight ends.

“At last (he) set us down on the deep floor close to the jagged rock’s base. Then, set free of my weight, with no orders any more from my Guide, like an arrow finally let loose to fly, he vanished instantly.”